Path 2

Path 2

Listen to An Official Heavy Rotation Playlist

June 22, 2009

The newest addition to the scrum of rock writer anthology books is Peter Terzian’s Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives, a literary update to the Marooned/Stranded/ Da Capo’s Best Music Writing/33 1/3 section of the bookstore bookshelf. The book, which features novelists and critics as varied as Joshua Ferris and James Wood writing about the albums that shaped them, is a response to what Terzian saw as an enormous practical gulf between “novels and poems and memoirs of literary quality” and regular, workaday music criticism–the kind, say, that involves appending stars, letter-grades, or numbers determined to within a tenth of a point either above or below the copy. It’s an attempt, in other words, to recapture the glories and felicities of Talese on Sinatra, or Didion on the Doors. In this week’s Voice, we asked 10 Heavy Rotation contributors to help us come up with an annotated playlist for the book. Listen to it below, after the jump, and read along here.